Maybe half of being a camgirl was talking about being a camgirl – not just turning a webcam on yourself and by extension your life, but documenting how your life changed from having turned a webcam on it. We were only doing this for a little while, from sometime in the late 1990's until about whenever mobile phone cameras became commonplace (let's say until the early 2000's.) Apple may also have had a hand in killing the camgirl, packaging webcams into the shells of our laptops. By extension our webcams were made less unusual, less intimate, and much less urgent. Though the golden years of camgirls were brief, they coincided with the rise of the web itself.

Screenshot, anacam.com, 2000

In 1997, a Minneapolis-based electronic pop musician named Ana Voog launched what she called “the internet's first 24/7 art/life cam,” which proved to also be its longest running...

It
should come as no surprise that under-recognized post-punk band Crash Course in
Science met while attending art school in Philadelphia in 1979. Band members
Dale Feliciello, Mallory Yago, and Michael Zodorozny experimented with the
then-burgeoning musical genre by replacing the jangular and distorted guitars,
rhythmic drums, and synthesizer beats with childhood toys and common kitchen
appliances. Their choice of instruments was born out of curiosity as much as
necessity: How could they create the music they wanted with their limited
student resources?

Thankfully,
their choices resulted in a sound uniquely their own: peculiarly original
minimalism vocals mixed with danceable and downright catchy beats. Coupled with
a need to express and explore their interest in performance art and music,
their final product in such songs as “Cakes in the Home,” and “Cardboard Lamb” resonated
for years after. The band is frequently regarded as an influential force in the
electro sound and the techno industrial genres.

I
recently spoke with Zodorozny about their initial interest in performance art
and how it influenced everything from their live shows to the creation of their
Frankenstein-like instruments.

You've been classified as
a post-punk band. Would you consider that to be an accurate term for your sound
and aesthetics?

Crash
Course in Science was formed in 1979 so we would consider being referred to as
post-punk band accurate. We were
inspired by punk-rock music and we we’re all big fans of the genre. We were
also inspired by the work of Brian Eno prior to the punk explosion. As artists and songwriters, Crash Course
in Science became a format for our expression.

Can you tell me a little
more about the performance art aspect tied to the band? What was/is your
history with performance art?

New York artist Matthew Lutz Kinoy’s latest dance performance, Donna Haraway's Expanded Benefits Package, is set in the compounded space of artist studio / gay bar / queer community center. Featuring music by SOPHIE, the event premieres a display of sculpture, large scale painting, and a video projection entitled “Ideals, Bars, Shoes, and Legs,” setting the stage for a sensual physical space in which the artist and collaborator Chelsea Culp dance and recite collaged erotic texts from London and New York. The event highlights a shifting frame, which allows for chance readings of moving image both painterly and physical. Donna Haraway's Expanded Benefits Package, remembers the New Museum’s neighboring historic center Judson Church, by celebrating the tradition of translating daily activities into activist choreography.

Lauren Cornell: Donna Haraway's Expanded Benefits Package
is set in what you describe as "the compounded space of artist studio /
gay bar / queer community center." Is this triangle of social spaces one that relates to your life? How
will the choreography of the piece reflect and express this location?

MATTHEW LUTZ-KINOY: In this performance I propose
that the individual creates the narrative of the social space and that the
social space constructs the narrative of the individual. The set of the performance
is constructed in video by superimposing footage from these locations on top of
one another and the role of the set shifts between being a forgrounded
character to a background for live action and music. For this piece I chose to
frame my research within a compounded architecture of the locations that had a
direct influence on the production of this work. These locations shaped my
daily gesture, they propose the way one’s body interacts with the world. My
choreography ...

What is it that made, and is still making, [4chan users] so angry about Stolz’s performance? The video contains graphic material, but in the age of Goatse, and Tubgirl, explicitness alone cannot shock or offend most people—especially internet trolls. Rather, it was the label on it—art—and the work’s perceived demographic—hipsters—that crawled under people’s skin. Many on the internet seem as angry with the audience—for sitting there, for clapping—as they are with the performance itself. Whether or not you like Stolz’s piece may be a matter of personal taste, but taste is never strictly personal. It stands at a nexus of hot-blooded issues; issues relating to class, status, accessibility, belonging and not belonging. Taste necessarily begs the question not just of how we assign value to things, but also of who should be doing the assigning. The hipster has come to epitomize for many what’s seen to be the ridiculousness of taste; and so it struck people who hated Interior Semiotics as no mere coincidence that many audience members in the video were punked out, or gothed up, or otherwise retrofitted.

A lot of the comments on the video fall into two categories: comments addressing the definition, or ideal definition, of art, and comments addressing the nature of hipsters. The latter tend to be violent expressions of a kind of inchoate rage.

"...Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for light to be in vain. Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony..." Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones, 1972

UNMAKEABLELOVE is a revisioning of Becketts initial investigation that focuses and makes interactively tangible, a state of confrontation and interpolation between our selves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. UNMAKEABLELOVE advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality and multimedia performance to engage the bodys primordial inscriptions. It locates Becketts society of lost ones in a virtual space that represents a severe state of physical confinement, evoking perhaps a prison, an asylum, a detention camp, or even a reality TV show.

While in UNMAKEABLELOVE the inhabitants of the cylinder remain oblivious in their condition, and we the viewers of their world, with our probing torch lights and prying gaze, are positioned as the ‘other’, forced to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that implicates us in this alienated narrative. The resulting ambiguity and complicit agency in UNMAKEABLELOVE reinforces a perceptual and psychological tension between ‘self’ and ‘other’ generated by the works’ mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation.

Originally founded in 1979 by Richard Fielding, Andrew Wright and Tom Ellard, Severed Heads was an electronic group based in Sydney. They used synthesizers, tape loops, and an array of electronics to yield a distinctive sound, one which could most easily be described as industrial music, which later developed into abstract pop. While the lineup changed over the years, Tom Ellard has been the main continuing force in the group, up until his announcement of its end in 2008. In 1983, Severed Heads began integrating live video in their performances, which became a mainstay in their work. This post collects videos of the group, the majority of which date from the early 1980s, and many of which document their use of video synthesizers. For more information about everything Severed Heads, check Ellard's official site.

Below: Videos of a live set performed on Metro TV, a community video center, in 1982. The video synthesizer used here was developed by Stephen Jones.

RYRAL is a realtime audio video performance by Tom DeFanti (creating computer animation with the GRaphics Symbiosis System or GRASS), Phil Morton (“up in the kitchen keepin’ track”), Dan Sandin (processing video with a Sandin Image Processor), Bob Snyder (performing experimental electronic music on an analog EMU synthesizer) and an uncredited dancer. This Media Art project was created and performed in April 1976 at the second Electronic Visualization Event (EVE II) in Chicago. EVE II took place at The University of Illinois Chicago.

Documentation of the performance was later exhibited by Diane Kirkpatrick in her exhibition Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945-1978 at The University of Michigan Museum of Art March 17 – April 23 1978.